New House
I have mentioned on my Facebook that we are getting sick of waiting on this damn short-sale house. Especially considering that we don't LOVE LOVE the house. We just like it. It's a good starter house. But I was never fully in love with it. It was the second best house we found (the BEST one we couldn't get approved for, unfortunately), so we were kind of just settling.
There definitely are certain aspects of the house I love though... like the outdoor grill/bar area... it's amazing; I also love that each room has an adjoining bathroom, which is pretty dang cool. What I really don't like about the house though is the layout. It's not an open layout... and while the square footage is there, the house just feels "cramped" to me. Plus, the kitchen was rather small (we were planning on totally remodeling it and expanding the kitchen... which is a lot of money). It just doesn't feel like our home. But we were settling with it because it was better than the other options... and it's certainly a nice home that we could make our own.
But short-sales take FOREVER to go through, and the more time this takes, the less we want this home.
Since we're living here in Fallbrook (where the house is at too), we've been driving a lot to Temecula for shopping and whatnot. We had always heard that Temecula is such a LONG commute to Camp Pendleton (where Gwydd works) and we always thought people who made that commute were crazy. But, after living in Fallbrook for a while now (which is right next to the base) and making frequent trips to Temecula... it REALLY doesn't seem like that far a drive. We searched military forums online and it seems that it's really not that bad to make that commute. So we decided to try and search for houses in Temecula. Just to see what we could find.
Well... the prices in Temecula are AMAZING. Way lower. We can get quite a larger home for the same price as homes in Fallbrook. Reason being: Fallbrook is in San Diego County and Temecula is in Riverside County. Unfortunately, the only houses that fit what we need/want and can afford are on the other side of Temecula... in the towns of Murrieta and Wildomar. That's an added 20-30 minutes to Gwydd's commute both ways. *sigh* We were still willing to take a look though, because they had some NICE houses and exactly what we needed. So we jotted down 7 different houses that our Real Estate Agent, Thor was going to show us on Thursday. Some of them we really liked from the pictures.
What we want is:
Not a penny more than $235k
At least 1600 sqft (closer to 2000 would be ideal)
3-4 bedrooms
2-3 baths
large kitchen
fenced yard with decent size
Absolutely no HOA (Home Owner's Association)
Absolutely no short-sales (lol)
THEN, this morning, a house here in Fallbrook came back on the market. Apparently there was a buyer, but the price range was too high for him so he had to drop out. Fortunately for us, the price is just at our cap (which is what the short-sale house is at anyways), it's not a short-sale (YAY), no HOA, etc etc. We looked at the pictures online and it looks really nice. It's an older home, which we really like (just gives the house more character and doesn't feel as sterile as new homes... to us at least). Here are the home's stats:
$234,900 (though seller is willing to offer $234k with 5k toward closing costs).
1630 sq. ft. (ok, so on our low end of square footage... but the short-sale house was about the same anyways)
4 bedrooms
2.5 baths
Thor took us to see the house today... and I gotta say, we really love it. Yes, our favorite house is still the one that we weren't able to get, but this new house is pretty close to it. We both like it a LOT more than the short-sale house. It's got a much more open layout, a LARGE kitchen!, and wood floors (ok, the wood floors aren't *actually* wood, but we can replace it with real wood now that we know it looks good there).
When you enter the house, you step into the foyer. It's a HUGE foyer. In fact, when we entered the house, I went "wow, this is a really small living room." Gwydd said "Actually, I think this might be the foyer..." and he was right. It's HUGE for a foyer! Absolutely a usable space.
There's a hallway that goes off of the foyer which leads to the front bathroom, and three bedrooms (one of the bedrooms has a connecting half-bathroom). The front bathroom has a GORGEOUS sink. The floor is a real pretty dark marble (the pictures don't do it justice... it's really nice). The bathtub is nice, but it needs some repairs. The three bedrooms are on the small side. That was my main worry with this house. It's 4 bedrooms, yet the same square footage as the short-sale house (which only has 3 bedrooms), I was worried about the bedroom sizes of this house. It's not a deal breaker by any means, but I do wish the bedrooms were a tad larger.
Anyways, back next to the foyer, you enter the dining room and kitchen. Very nice looking. The kitchen is JUST what we wanted... size wise. We would have to replace the counter-tops (they're tile, which is terrible to cook on... we'd replace it with granite) and touch up the cupboards (we're going to sand off the white paint so that the wood shows through on the doors... then we will paint the actual cupboard itself a different colour... the doors remaining wood though... which will be stained a darker colour). But other than that, it's great in there! There's kind of an "island", though since it's connected to a wall, it's more like a peninsula, LOL. TONS and TONS of cupboard space! The best part, double stoves! The dishwasher needs replacing though... that thing is ancient. The floors of the kitchen/dining room look MUCH nicer in person. We were very "eh" about it from the pictures, but in person, it looks LEAGUES nicer.
From the dining room, through DOUBLE DOORS (I know, nice!) we enter the living room. I love it. There's a lovely fireplace and an AWESOME built in storage and hutch (which would be *perfect* for my sewing stuff!). The actual area itself is not that large... so what we decided is that the living room will become the office. Normally we have our computers and everything in the living room with the couch and TV because we like to have the TV on in the background while we're working/playing on the computers... but, we could easily use the foyer for the living room and just put the TV and couch in there... then use the ACTUAL living room as our office. There's plenty of room in there to put a small TV (we have had one in storage for a while), so we can have our background entertainment. So we'd have to switch things around than what we're used to, but we definitely think it could work.
From the livingroom/office, there's a door that goes right into the master bedroom. It's the same flooring as the office. Again, it's not as large as we'd like, but workable. There's a connecting bathroom, with the same beautiful marble flooring. And a BIG walk-in closet! We have talked about it and we could *easily* use that closet to store all our clean clothes and get rid of our dressers... giving us more room to work with in the bedroom. Rain can get one of the dressers and the other one can be used in the garage for storage. Our dressers never matched our decor anyways, so I'm totally for this idea, lol. The master bedroom also has a door that leads outside to the backyard, which we really like.
Since the office and the master bedroom are connected, it's almost like it's one giant room separated by a wall and door, lol. So we decided that we are going to expand the decorations from our bedroom to the office. (Our bedroom is an East Indian theme, btw. India/Morocco/etc)
Here are some pictures (these are the pictures from the Realtor):
Outside. It's a nice greenish-teal colour that looks really pretty in person. I really like the outside colour of the house.
Here's the foyer. It's HUGE for a foyer and could easily be a family/TV room:
The foyer/family room leads to the dining room and kitchen (again, these pictures don't do it justice... the floor is actually MUCH nicer looking. Though like I said, we will be replacing the counter tops and updating the cupboards... but the size is WONDERFUL):
Then the dining room leads to the living room/office through double doors:
Here are the pictures we took:
Excuse the quality, it was taken from the inside of our car, lol...
A wrought iron fence was added to the front of the yard after the Realtor pictures were taken. They're quite nice. :-) Way better than the crappy white picket fence they had in the pictures from looking at the house on Google Earth:
These are interesting... at first we didn't like them, they looked weird. But then we realized what they are. The two plates in the middle fold up to become shelves, while the side fold in. Now that we realize what they are, we quite like them. They'd look lovely with some potted plants on them. :-)
I tried to get a better picture of the floors in the kitchen and dining room since the Realtor pictures do not do it justice at all, but these still don't show how pretty they are. They're actually REALLY nice in person. I guess they just don't photograph well, lol...
This is a neat little tile work done right in front of the kitchen sink. I like that it's not "perfect" looking. Kind of gives it a more personal feel.
Picture of Gwydd in the office walking toward the dining room:
This is the door in the master bedroom that leads outside:
The front bathroom (those floors are GORGEOUS in person... marble and shiny):
Side yard that leads to the office through the sliding glass door... we need to fix up the yard some and do a bit of landscaping:
I don't know if these pictures really do the house justice, but it's really really great. We just made an offer of $235,000 with $6,000 toward closing costs. We're pretty confident it'll get accepted. If, after we are accepted and the inspector finds any problems that need fixed, we're going to ask the seller to pay for any of those.
I'm really happy with this house and I definitely want it. It may not be as big as we were hoping for (though it's the same sq. footage as the short-sale house, just with one more bedroom... which means, while we get more rooms, we also have *smaller* rooms... like I said though, not a deal breaker... something we can work around), but it's got a LOT of potential. I really like the layout and it feels much more homey than the short-sale house. I can see us raising a family and being happy here. Sure, there are things with this house we'd be compromising, but it doesn't feel like we're settling. Which is how it felt with the short sale. And this house is in the ideal location (not super far away like Murrieta or Wildomar).
So yay! I'm much happier now! :-D I can't wait to start painting, moving our stuff in, fixing up some of the things we wanted to change/update with the house, put solar panels in (which is what we are planning on doing soon), and building a compost bin. Yay for home ownership!
Sorry this entry was sooooo long, haha. I'm sure most people didn't read all of it. :-P